I’d thank if somebody could put some light on all this and let me know when could I run into trouble with load average. Of course, I should consider some other facts like slowness of system, etc, etc, but for the moment I need to take a specific value to set my alerts.

Re: Load average recommended thresholds

If you use (if you have) glance tool ,you can use its default, to analyze load average.By default cpu bottleneck is around 50% ,alarm will be triggered as warning in glance.

additionaly, On multi-processor systems, the values represent the average over all CPUs. Thus the percentage columns never exceed 100. For individual processor detail, use the 'a' (CPU By Processor) screen.

Re: Load average recommended thresholds

I have always hated the load average output. It may be because I have known old school admins that place to much emphasis on it. From my understanding you are possibly hitting a bottleneck if your load average is nearing the same amount you have in cpus/cores. So if your load average starts getting close to 16, then you might have a problem. I say might because it is not necessarily bad that your processors are doing work. Tuning is a science and an art. You really how the system is supposed to function and what your users are expecting. I would suggest getting some baseline data and making comparisons along the way.

It is hard to give an exact number since every server/application is a little different. There are no hard set numbers to give anyone. That is why performance/tuning guys make lots o' cash. In the words of any good tuning guru, the answer is "It depends".

"The difference between me and you? I will read the man page." and "Respect the hat." and "You could just do a search on ITRC, you don't need to start a thread on a topic that's been answered 100 times already." Oh, and "What. no points???"